Project Documentation

[Moose]

I was wondering, because i'm curious.
How many people on this board who have their own os projects actually plan and document their work with full plan, analysis and design methodology?

Moose.

[carbonBased]

When I first started ndk I wrote up a lot of documentation.  It's all on paper, though.  Not much (if anything) is online, or available in the download.  In time, I will transcribe it to PDF, or something similar.

Trion, another OS project which I am a part of, designed even more so before developing.  We actually have UML class diagrams, PDF documents, etc. available, as well as documented coding standards.

Cheers,
Jeff

[Gnome]

Because I work alone on my OS, I keep most the design in my head, and work on this as I go. However, once part of the OS becomes somewhat mature, then I document it in LaTeX in the source tree so I remain consistent in the design principles. I'm not rigorous about it, but I try to keep these documents up to date as things change. I don't document the API (note the difference here between document and comment -- the API is commented, but its not documented), because I think that's a waste of time; I just look at the headers if I forget the parameters for a function. I'm concerned with principles rather than specifics.

Gnome

[Moose]

yeah i've been looking into documentation with uml.

I've not done anything too drastic to my os for about 4-6 months now, college committments, and now that i've come back over the past couple of days i look at my code and 'uuh', i can't remember what im doing.

Moose.

[ezanahka]

I'm working solo and my OS is both very simple and very well commented on the code level so the only kind of external documentation I have seen necessary is an extensive text document which explains how the system should work.

- eza

[Karig]

Well, I have been planning, but I haven't really planned very far ahead. I'm just trying to come up with a workable system that I can use as soon as possible.

I do write boot sectors that load and test the code I'd like to put into my OS, and I document each one, explaining exactly what each does. The documentation is my website, http://www.karig.net/. Of course, I don't have a usable OS yet.